1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to call processing centers, such as those providing customer service, reservation assistance, help desk services, and other such arrangements where human operators answer customers' telephone calls and provide the appropriate service. More particularly, the invention concerns a telephone call handling center where operators listen to their respective callers, and instead of speaking directly to the callers, the operators utilize synthesized voices that are generated or modified to exhibit or omit accents, dialects, or other prescribed speech characteristics.
2. Description of the Related Art
In conducting day-to-day business, it is nearly impossible to avoid call processing centers. Despite various organizational differences, call processing centers generally use a number of human operators to answer customers' telephone calls and provide the appropriate service. Many call processing centers today also utilize machine-operated voice menus. From the customer's perspective, a call processing center appears to be a telephone number that is available to receive customers' calls to serve the appropriate business, e.g., airline reservations, credit card billing inquiries, utility services, product help desks, and the like.
Call processing centers enjoy widespread commercial success today. In fact, the call processing center is now an essential tool for any business that expects a significant volume of customer calls. Despite the admitted utility of call processing centers, there are substantial costs, most of which relates to staffing. Significant expenses are required to compensate employees, comply with legal mandates, provide health and pension benefits, manage personnel, and otherwise support call processing center employees.
Still, companies cannot survive without some professional means to facilitate contact with their customers. For companies that cannot afford a call processing center and its appropriate systems, there are some alternatives of lesser utility such as providing customers with e-mail support, Internet fill-in-the-blanks submission forms, using a nominal number of telephone operators, etc. For some customers, these approaches may be insufficient: some customers may lack e-mail or Internet access, some may find the e-mail/Internet submission processes to be cumbersome, and some customers may be frustrated with the long wait times of minimally staffed customer service departments.
In today's competitive business climate, companies that fail to provide a call processing center suffer a competitive disadvantage, and risk losing business. Consequently, known call processing centers may not be completely adequate for all applications due to certain unsolved problems.